Quality Assurance (QA)

What is Quality Assurance (QA)?

Quality assurance is defined as the process that helps a company to ensure that its products and services meet the quality standards set by the company or the market itself. Another way of understanding quality assurance is a company’s process to improve the quality of its products. Many companies view their QA process as a promise to internal stakeholders and customers. All of this is done to make sure that the company will deliver high-quality products that provide a positive user experience.

Quality assurance encompasses the processes and procedures to systematically monitor different aspects of a service or facility of a company. Through audits and other forms of assessment, quality assurance detects and corrects problems that fall outside established standards or requirements.

In other words, quality assurance ensures a high level of quality during the development of products or services provided by the company. You can say that “quality assurance” could sometimes be used interchangeably with “quality control”.

However, quality control pertains to the actual fulfillment of the standards of the product that have been put in place. Whereas, when it comes to quality assurance, it is about checking in on quality control methods to ensure they’re working as planned.

Most businesses utilize some form of quality assurance in the production of any product. Be it a manufacturer of consumer packaged goods or software development companies. These companies may even establish a quality assurance department with employees to meet up with the mark.

Also, See: Change Management